Tax return preparation systems are valuable tools that provide services that were previously available only through interaction with a human professional, if not attempted by oneself. Prior to the advent of tax return preparation systems, a user would be required to consult with a tax preparation professional for services, and the user would be limited, and potentially inconvenienced, by the hours during which the professional was available for consultation. Furthermore, the user might be required to travel to the professional's physical location. Beyond the inconveniences of scheduling and travel, the user would also be at the mercy of the professional's education, skill, personality, and varying moods. All of these factors resulted in a user who was vulnerable to human error, variations in human ability, and variations in human temperament.
A tax return preparation system can provide benefits that human professionals are hard-pressed to provide, such as: not having limited working hours, not being geographically limited, and not being subject to human error or variations in human ability or temperament. A tax return preparation system can also be configured to provide personalized services to users based on characteristics of individual users and based on the users' history with the tax return preparation system. To provide such services, a tax return preparation system can be programmed to include and select from tens of thousands of user experience pages to assist tax filers in preparing their tax returns. This massive number of user experience pages can make user experience debugging a logistical nightmare for a service provider.
Long-tail user experiences make it virtually impossible for service providers to humanly test (e.g., click through and evaluate) every combination of, for example, tens of thousands of user experience pages in a tax return preparation system. Long-tail user experiences are generally user experiences where only small quantities of users reach many of the particular combinations/sequences of user experience pages. Even though service providers have developers test their code before deploying it in new versions of tax return preparation systems, the man hours and man power required to test every combination, sequence, or probable combination of user experience pages makes such testing and debugging practices difficult to justify the costs paid for the benefits received. However, it would be very problematic to haphazardly provide tax return preparation services from a tax return preparation system that has not been tested and checked for defects. Indeed, running into errors may decrease customers' confidence in the tax return preparation system and in the service provider of said system, potentially causing customer to seek the services of competitor service providers. Such an outcome is neither desirable for the customer nor the service provider.
What is needed is a method and system for crowdsourcing software quality testing and error detection in a tax return preparation system, according to one embodiment.